By way of saving the situation in some slight degree Japan sought from China a guarantee that no portion of Manchuria should thereafter be leased or ceded to a foreign state. But France warned Japan that to press such a demand would offend Russia, and Russia declared that, for her part, she had no intention of trespassing in Manchuria. Japan, had she been in a position to insist on the guarantee, would also have been in a position to disobey the mandate of the three powers. Unable to do either the one or the other, she quietly stepped out of Manchuria, and proceeded to double her army and treble her navy. As a reward for the assistance nominally rendered to China in this matter, Russia obtained permission in Peking to divert her Trans-Asian railway from the huge bend of the Amur to the straight line through Manchuria. Neither Germany nor France received any immediate recompense. Three years later, by way of indemnity for the murder of two missionaries by a mob, Germany seized a portion of the province of Shantung. Immediately, on the principle that two wrongs make a right, Russia obtained a lease of the Liaotung peninsula, from which she had driven Japan in 1895. This act she followed by extorting from China permission to construct a branch of the Trans-Asian railway through Manchuria from north to south. Russia's maritime aspirations had now assumed a radically altered phase. Instead of pushing southward from Vladivostok and Possiet Bay along the coast of Korea, she had suddenly leaped the Korean peninsula and found access to the Pacific in Liaotung. Nothing was wanting to establish her as practical mistress of Manchuria except a plausible excuse for garrisoning the place. Such an excuse was furnished by the Boxer rising in 1900. Its conclusion saw her in military occupation of the whole region, and she might easily have made her occupation permanent by prolonging it until peace and order should have been fully restored. But here she fell into an error of judgment. Imagining that the Chinese could be persuaded or intimidated to any concession, she proposed a convention virtually recognizing her title to Manchuria.